Todd Walton: City-States

My brother, a successful Internet Technology person living in San Mateo, recently wrote, “I know the Bay Area is back because for about three years no one was going out to dinner and a concert, so almost no one was playing at Yoshi’s; it was almost all spillover comedy acts. Now, all the ancient jazz/funk/smooth jazz/new age artists are performing at Yoshi’s again, and come to think of it, we just saw Liz Story there a few months back. The aging Yuppies, or as I like to call us, the sachems of the lower-reaches of the 1% are back in the tall cotton. Unfortunately it’s still not very recovered at all for the other 99%.”

My brother’s observation of those important economic indicators—going out to dinner and a concert—reminded me of something else he hipped me to a few years ago: the Worldwide Centers of Commerce Index, a remarkable and telling project funded by MasterCard. This fascinating study culminated in a multi-dimensional ranking of the top seventy-five city-states in the world, and has not, as far as I know, been updated since 2008. Nevertheless, if you are interested in how the giant multinational corporations develop their global game plans, I highly recommend you hop on a fast computer and check out the Worldwide Centers of Commerce Index. The revelatory information in the study confirms everything Buckminster Fuller wrote about how the supranational powers operate on spaceship earth.

Long before the rise of large and powerful nations came the rise of powerful city-states. Venice, for instance, known for several centuries as the Republic of Venice, was one of the most powerful city-states in the world during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Venice was a great center of commerce and art and war (notably the Crusades) for five hundred years, from the 12th through the 17th Centuries. Today we think of Venice as a quaint old city in Italy with gondolas plying canals, but at the height of her powers Venice was not an Italian city; Italy was essentially subservient to Venice. As a consequence of that greatness, the ambitious and talented flocked to Venice to make their fortunes, which is the main point of Mastercard’s Worldwide Centers of Commerce Index. To wit: the groovier the city-state, the more talented, creative, ambitious people will be attracted there; and those are the people in today’s world that the supranational corporations seek to capture.

According to the 2008 index (compiled before the economic meltdown that has so drastically altered the global financial situation and before the Fukushima nuclear disaster rendered Tokyo radioactive) the top ten city-states in the world were London, New York, Tokyo, Singapore, Chicago, Hong Kong, Paris, Frankfurt, Seoul, and Amsterdam. The San Francisco Bay Area was ranked twenty-eighth and rising fast. The seven criteria used to judge a city-state (each criterion composed of many sub-criteria) were: 1. Legal and political framework 2. Economic stability 3. Ease of doing business 4. Financial flow 5. Business center 6. Knowledge creation and information flow 7. Livability.

The authors of the study write with unbridled enthusiasm about an interconnected society of high-tech culturally exciting city-states taking maximum advantage of the resources and financial possibilities of the world through their interactions with each other, while the land and people outside the city-states are seen as extractive realms where money and manpower and natural resources and farmland are mined for the benefit of the city-states and those folks smart or lucky enough to be, in the words of my brother, among the sachems of the 1%.

This is how the world actually works—global feudalism—and the myriad wars around the world are being fought to serve the interests of those city-states, not in service of nations. This was Buckminster Fuller’s insight that he so desperately wanted people to understand, that the supranational rulers use nationalism to manipulate the masses in the service of the city-states. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are fought for the benefit of the city-states and their ruling elite, not to protect America or to promote democracy. Bucky believed that if people could learn to look beyond the primitive glare of nationalism, they would have a clear view of this superstructure of city-states; and with this clear view the people would cease to support the wars and destructive practices of resource extraction that enrich the city-states and impoverish the rest of the world.

As Bucky wrote in Critical Path (published in 1981), “Long ago the world’s great religions learned how to become transnational or more effectively supranational. Next the world’s great ideologies learned how to become supranational. Most recently the world’s largest financial-enterprise corporations have become completely supranational in their operation. Big religion, ideologies, and businesses alike found it intolerable to operate only within 150 walled-in pens (nations). Freeing themselves by graduating into supranational status, they have left all the people in the 150 pens to struggle with all the disadvantages of 150 mutually opposed economic policies.”

Indeed, when we use the city-state model to look at various aspects of American society that seem ridiculous and counter-intuitive using a “what’s-good-for-America-as-a-nation” model, the ridiculous and counter-intuitive suddenly make perfect sense. For instance, if the vast majority of Americans want and need Single Payer Healthcare, and such a system would save the nation and her people trillions of dollars, why don’t we have that system? Because such a system is not in the best interest of those city-states based in America. The resident corporations provide good healthcare for people of value and importance to the elite of those city-states, while everyone else is either irrelevant or a source of money extracted through exorbitant healthcare costs.

When one examines the upcoming Presidential election in light of the city-state model, we see that Obama is a product of the Chicago city-state hierarchy and a devoted servant of all American-based city-states, especially New York, while Romney was developed by the city-state of Boston with deep ties to New York. Now, a month before the election, it appears that the city-state elite want Obama re-elected, for he guarantees less unrest among the disenfranchised than would the Republican candidate and he is also a fantastic salesman of the wholly erroneous nation model that keeps 99% of humanity enslaved to the corporate elite. But no matter who wins the election, the city-states will be served by one of their high-level operatives.

One of the most interesting things to me about today’s city-state system is the enormous expense (hundreds of billions annually) that goes into enhancing the physical connections between city-states, including airlines, airports, high-speed transportation, and high-tech hotels and resorts for visiting sachem. With internet technology making it possible for people to communicate instantaneously with each other anywhere on earth, one would think that the need for concentrating people in particular places on earth would no longer be necessary; yet just the opposite is true. In the hierarchical systems dominating global commerce today, those who wish to succeed in any of those systems must live in a city-state where those systems are based.

I had a taste of this your-body-must-be-here phenomenon some decades ago when I embarked on a career as a screenwriter. After a motion picture was made of one of my novels, numerous doors in the Hollywood hierarchy were briefly open to me. Los Angeles and New York are the two American city-states where the movie industry hierarchy is concentrated, and when I met with several Los Angeles-based movie agents in my quest to find a representative, they were all eager to represent me, on one condition: that I move to Los Angeles or New York—to live anywhere else was unacceptable.

“But why must I live in Los Angeles or New York?” I asked the most powerful agent to give me an audience. “My work is writing screenplays. I can fly in for…”

“Your work,” she deftly interrupted, “is to establish personal relationships with the people here who have the power to get movies made. If a hot producer wants to meet with you, I have to know you can meet with him today, in an hour if necessary. If someone with clout gets interested in you and he’s giving a party and calls me and says he wants you at that party, I have to know you will be there, and pronto. You can write the greatest screenplays ever written, but if you are not based here and developing strong relationships with important people, you will never get a movie made. Not in this system. Can’t happen.”

“But I had a movie made,” I protested, the thought of trying to survive in Los Angeles or New York far beyond my powers of comprehension, “and I wasn’t here.”

“Based on your novel,” she said with a condescending nod. “Which did zilch at the box office. But if you want to live somewhere else and write novels, I will be happy to represent your published works. However, if you want to be taken seriously as a screenwriter, you must live here or in New York, and preferably with a presence in both places. Otherwise, you are simply not worth my time.”

So here we dwell in Mendocino on the outskirts of the great city-state of San Francisco/Silicon Valley, home to Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Visa, Pixar, Genentech, Hewlett-Packard, and Lucasfilm, to name but a few of the newer giants in the corporate oligarchy; and we most certainly owe much of our relative prosperity to our proximity to that fabulous concentration of wealth and power.
~
(This article appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser October 2012)
~~

One Comment

I well recall many decades ago reading “Nine Chains To The Moon”, and having my young eyes opened to the notion of the “Great Pirates” and the supranational ambitions at work in the world. But seven years in the premiere city-state of New York was enough, and I headed for the hills. And even the 1% need their wine and weed. At least we up here can take pride in our position as an idiosyncratic but important outlying narco-province.

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Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so. ~Robert Ingersoll

All religion is a foolish answer to a foolish question. ~Thomas Shelby

The strongly religious fear our capacity for moral reasoning that does not require a magical, invisible deity. They fear our ability to be ethical without the threat of hell or the reward of heaven. They fear that our allegiance is not to this or that country, or this or that prophet, or this or that guru, but to humanity as a whole. ~Phil Zuckerman

The idea that God could only forgive our sins by having his son tortured to death as a scapegoat is surely, from an objective point of view, a deeply unpleasant idea. If God wanted to forgive us our sins, why didn’t he just forgive them? Why did he have to have his son tortured? ~Richard Dawkins

Small is beautiful, when small is skilled and dedicated. ~Gene Logsdon

All religions are lies and scams, and all believers are victims. ~David Silverman

We [atheists] have no martyrs, we have no saints. ~Christopher Hitchens

Morality is doing right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right. ~H L Mencken

I've observed that people tend to live at one of two extremes in the spectrum of life: those who live on the edge, and those who avoid the edge. Those who live on the edge are hanging out in the most dangerous and unstable places — yet they're also often the most powerful agents of change, because the edge is where change is happening; away from the edge, things are naturally unchanging. ~Thom Hartmann

Religion. It's given people hope in a world torn apart by religion. ~Jon Stewart

My 12th year was my most Christian and most boring year in my life. ~Chuck Berry

Come on. You just can’t come up with anything more ridiculous than someone who honestly thinks that all human woes stem from an incident in which a talking snake accosted a naked woman in a primeval garden and talked her into eating a piece of fruit. ~Keith Parsons

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything. ~Umberto Eco

Christians don’t need to be born again, they need to grow up. ~John Shelby Spong

Life is not a problem to be solved, nor a question to be answered. Life is a mystery to be experienced. ~Alan Watts

Society is like a stew: If you don't stir it up every now and then, the scum rises to the top.~Edward Abbey

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. ~Buckminster Fuller

How thoughtful of God to arrange matters so that, wherever you happen to be born, the local religion always turns out to be the true one. ~ Richard Dawkins

I’m not saying there isn’t a god, but there isn’t a god who cares about people. And who wants a god who doesn’t give a shit? ~Robert Munsch

One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion. ~Arthur C. Clarke

Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day; Give him a religion, and he'll starve to death
while praying for a fish. ~ Anon

When you understand why you dismiss all the other gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours. ~ Stephen Roberts

Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning. ~ Joseph Campbell

The only true definition of an atheist: a person who disbelieves or lacks belief in God or gods. ~Oxford English Dictionary

You have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

Faith is just another word for gullibility.

I sang as one / Who on a tilting deck sings / To keep men's courage up, though the wave hangs / That shall cut off their sun. ~C. Day Lewis

Resilience Tools (Basic)

Freethought/Stoics

Religion Divides

The Wikipedia of Christian Terrorism (Link)

Books of the Freethinkers Bible

What is a fact beyond all doubt is that we share an ancestor with every other species of animal and plant on the planet. We know this because some genes are recognizably the same genes in all living creatures, including animals, plants and bacteria. And, above all, the genetic code itself — the dictionary by which all genes are translated — is the same across all living creatures that have ever been looked at. We are all cousins. Your family tree includes not just obvious cousins like chimpanzees and monkeys but also mice, buffaloes, iguanas, wallabies, snails, dandelions, golden eagles, mushrooms, whales, wombats and bacteria. All are our cousins. Every last one of them. Isn't that a far more wonderful thought than any myth? And the most wonderful thing of all is that we know for certain it is literally true...

The whole world is made of incredibly tiny things, much too small to be visible to the naked eye — and yet none of the myths or so-called holy books that some people, even now, think were given to us by an all-knowing god, mentions them at all! In fact, when you look at those myths and stories, you can see that they don't contain any of the knowledge that science has patiently worked out. They don't tell us how big or how old the universe is; they don't tell us how to treat cancer; they don't explain gravity or the internal combustion engine; they don't tell us about germs, or anesthetics. In fact, unsurprisingly, the stories in holy books don't contain any more information about the world than was known to the primitive peoples who first started telling them! If these 'holy books' really were written, or dictated, or inspired, by all-knowing gods, don't you think it's odd that those gods said nothing about any of these important and useful things? -Richard Dawkins

Prayer seems to me a cry of weakness, and an attempt to avoid, by trickery, the rules of the game as laid down. I do not choose to admit weakness. I accept the challenge of responsibility. Life, as it is, does not frighten me, since I have made my peace with the universe as I find it, and bow to its laws… It seems to me that organized creeds are collections of words around a wish. I feel no need for such.

I know that nothing is destructible; things merely change forms. When the consciousness we know as life ceases, I know that I shall still be part and parcel of the world. I was a part before the sun rolled into shape and burst forth in the glory of change. I was, when the earth was hurled out from its fiery rim. I shall return with the earth to Father Sun, and still exist in substance when the sun has lost its fire, and disintegrated into infinity to perhaps become a part of the whirling rubble of space. Why fear? The stuff of my being is matter, ever changing, ever moving, but never lost; so what need of denominations and creeds to deny myself the comfort of all my fellow men? -Zora Neale Hurston

Democratic Socialism

Socialist Alternative is the organization that spearheaded the campaign to elect Kshama Sawant to Seattle City Council, the first independent socialist elected in a major U.S. city in decades. We are a national organization fighting in our workplaces, communities, and campuses against the exploitation and injustices people face every day. We are community activists fighting against budget cuts in public services; we are activists campaigning for a $15/hour minimum wage and fighting, democratic unions; we are people of all colors speaking out against racism and attacks on immigrants, students organizing against tuition hikes and war, women and men fighting sexism and homophobia.

We believe the Republicans and Democrats are both parties of big business, and we are campaigning to build an independent, alternative party of workers and young people to fight for the interests of the millions, not the millionaires.

We see the global capitalist system as the root cause of the economic crisis, poverty, discrimination, war, and environmental destruction. As capitalism moves deeper into crisis, a new generation of workers and youth must join together to take the top 500 corporations into public ownership under democratic control to end the ruling elites’ global competition for profits and power.

We believe the dictatorships that existed in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were perversions of what socialism is really about.

We are for democratic socialism where ordinary people will have control over our daily lives.

An atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An atheist believes that deed must be done instead of prayer said. An atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty vanished, war eliminated. ~Madalyn Murray O'Hair, Founder

In the history of the world, the number of times a supernatural anything has been proven true is zero. Every god, ghost, spirit, devil, possession, and miracle ever claimed true is a lie. No exceptions. The number of times an atheistic (godless) argument has been proven wrong by a theistic argument is zero... In contrast, every time a theist-versus-atheist argument has been settled, an atheistic argument has won. This does not mean science is antireligion; it just means (or rather, strongly implies) religion is wrong... I challenge anyone to find any scientifically valid testable proof of anything supernatural, ever. If you can prove it, even once, I'll quit my job. I'm not nervous, as it has never been done in history, because it's ALL a lie. ~David Silverman, President

Local Organic Family Farms

THE SMALL ORGANIC FARM greatly discomforts the corporate/ industrial mind because the small organic farm is one of the most relentlessly subversive forces on the planet. Over centuries both the communist and the capitalist systems have tried to destroy small farms because small farmers are a threat to the consolidation of absolute power.

Thomas Jefferson said he didn’t think we could have democracy unless at least 20% of the population was self-supporting on small farms so they were independent enough to be able to tell an oppressive government to stuff it.

It is very difficult to control people who can create products without purchasing inputs from the system, who can market their products directly thus avoiding the involvement of mercenary middlemen, who can butcher animals and preserve foods without reliance on industrial conglomerates, and who can’t be bullied because they can feed their own faces. ~Eliot Coleman